The Conversion Practices Bill Shrinks the Self and Hollows Out Civil Society

The drafting of Cabinet Office Bills provides a revealing insight into the culture and standards of our Government. Many of us were mystified by the poor drafting of Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill, and this long-awaited Conversion Practices Draft Bill simply supplies more of the same. It is not a long document (20 pages), and much of it is given over to administration with precious little attention to definitions. In that respect, there are striking resemblances to the Leadbeater Bill, of which more anon.

That does not mean that there is nothing which cannot be gainfully commented on. Here are a few of the more prominent issues which ought to raise concerns in the mind of anyone concerned about how a civil society operates. The first of these is – obviously – nomenclature. For some years, transgender and LGBTQI+ activists have railed against a phenomenon called ‘Conversion Therapy’, and if by this they were referring to physical, sexual, medical or coercive interventions then I guess we might have little to quibble about. However, to a large extent such matters are already covered under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, Section 31 of the Children Act 1989 and the Fraud Act 2006 when false representations are made for such ‘therapies’. There are, of course, some gaps in the protections, namely in such areas as (i) unregulated talking therapies, (ii) non-clinical religious or quasi-religious activity, and (iii) preventative intervention. If the Bill were genuinely concerned about closing the gap in respect of therapy, then there are obvious, precise measures they could have tackled. What it has done instead is widen the field, in order to create a brand-new ideological offence around disapproved influence. The very switch in terminology tells us that the target is not just abusive therapy, but now takes in the wider ecology of familial influence and moral and religious context. This is a matter about which we should not be indifferent.

To be fair, the morphing nomenclature was hardly unexpected, as the December 2023 Scottish Government consultation pulled the same trick. But this is not a neutral shift. ‘Therapy’ would have suggested a relatively identifiable class of clinical, pseudo-clinical or organised interventions. ‘Practices’ can actually include almost anything – conversation, prayer, pastoral counsel, parental discipline, church teaching, accountability relationships, mentoring, any kind of spiritual direction or even informal advice. This definitional field is immensely wide, and I suspect it is intended to have a chilling effect on anyone connected with the individual at risk, long before any potential event that could theoretically lead to prosecution. Schools, churches, parents, counsellors, charities and youth workers won’t be asking ‘what is criminal?’ but rather, ‘what might someone later on characterise as a conversion practice?’ And, as we will see, the Bill is an exercise in ambiguity on that point, sharing the DNA with many regulatory edicts which are designed to disempower, demotivate and depress any natural instincts towards societal cohesion.

Let’s now move on to consider the extensive use of ambiguity, a tactic which is deployed liberally in the brief section covering definitions. We are told that the Bill relates to the “carrying out of abusive conversion practices” – that is to say, a range of activities which are both “conversion practices” and “abusive”. We are immediately told (Section 1.3) that, whatever healthcare providers supply cannot be considered under this kind of terminology, unless the professional standards are regarded as substandard – despite the growing evidence of detriment to patients, later in life, as a direct result of gender-transitioning. That seems to be a significant carve-out, resulting in an asymmetrical impact of the Bill, and demonstrates a remarkable naïveté about the financial interests of Big Pharma. Whether or not a “conversion practice” may be deemed “abusive” we are told (s. 1.5) is a “question of fact” and s.1.6 lists a set of criteria which are almost entirely subjective in nature and could not, by any rational means, be deemed a “question of fact”. Section 2 unpacks what it means by the “Offence of carrying out an abusive conversion practice on an individual”, but even here we end up bogged down in ambiguity. If the practice is “abusive” then it “causes” “(a) serious harm to the individual’s physical and mental health, or (b) serious alarm or distress to the individual which has a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities”. This is a nostrum, not an objective principle. How might we know what is a definitive or substantive cause? It is not as if a physician prescribes a pill, and the patient either recovers or suddenly dies. There, one has some objective basis for describing causality. Here we are awash in a sea of subjectivity and hearsay – one reads the Bill and knows that nothing here is going to end well.

And what about the issue of distress and mental health: who will we blame that on? Recent research has shown that transitioners are not in a better mental state following their transition – and in many cases are in a worse position. The data associate gender-transitioning candidates with a significantly above-average exposure to neuro-divergence, bipolar and a range of other pathologies, so who is going to pull off the miraculous feat of teasing out the specific contribution made by a parent, lovingly urging ‘Please slow down, you may regret this’ or a responsible pastor saying, ‘Your body is not a mistake, and it’s the only one you get in this life’? The post-Cass medical opinion actually makes the Bill’s stab at a kind of oversimplified psychological gloss all the more unfeasible. The social imaginary that lies behind this Bill’s drafting apparently has no insight into a world where a damaged, barely functional product of gender transitioning will stand before a court of law and say something like, ‘I was distressed, vulnerable, autistic, depressed, bipolar, traumatised or socially isolated. Instead of exploring that complexity, clinicians affirmed a single explanatory narrative and placed me on a pathway leading to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgery, infertility, sexual dysfunction, loss of healthy tissue, or permanent bodily change. I now experience serious distress, grief, anger, and regret. Why is that not an abusive conversion practice?’ I am not fabricating an unworldly example to make a point: the two cases I am familiar with had a lengthy history of complex psychiatric diagnoses, none of which was apparently of any interest to the clinicians. And to some extent at least, ‘officially’ the Government recognises these issues.

Fourthly, I hope I am not the only one to spot the evidence of ideological dissonance in the drafting here. I spent probably too much time analysing the text of Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill, but this new publication seems to breathe the same air, uses very similar language and yet arrives at a wholly dissonant position. The two Bills reveal a remarkable inversion. In the assisted-dying context, the state proposes to license professional facilitation of death, provided the correct procedural and clinical conditions are satisfied. In the conversion-practices context, the state proposes to criminalise facilitation of certain forms of moral, spiritual or identity-related change, while exempting healthcare professionals unless they fall far below professional standards. The common factor is not the protection of life, nor even the avoidance of harm, but the state’s confidence in authorised clinical process – precisely the kind of confidence about which long-term experience should encourage caution. The clinician becomes the figure through whom otherwise morally dangerous conduct is redescribed as care, and that seems to me to be a somewhat arbitrary branding exercise. In essence, this Bill is leading us in the direction of believing that the moral meaning of an action is being altered by institutional location, a move that instantly disqualifies any form of authority, other than one which may rubber-stamp the individual’s misguided aspiration towards some form of gender transition.

Fifthly, I wonder if it is possible to deduce from this draft Bill the kinds of worldview assumptions which must be in the minds of those who drafted it? I appreciate this may seem to be a bit of a jump, and the risk may be that of unfairness, but I think we are on safe ground with the following underlying beliefs:

• It assumes identity is morally self-authenticating – and in this case, we are thinking of one very specific instance of identity;
• It treats distress as a moral trump card – whereas, in practice, the experience of distress may have multiple outcomes, not all of them negative in nature;
• It is suspicious of informal moral authority;
• It medicalises moral legitimacy;
• It has a one-way imagination of harm;
• It confuses safeguarding with ideological sorting;
• It is bureaucratically compassionate but morally incurious.

That is not the worldview of classical liberalism, which protects conscience and pluralism. Nor is it the worldview of common-law modesty, which waits for objectively demonstrable wrongs. The Bill appears to have been drafted from within a therapeutic-managerial worldview in which self-declared sexual or gender identity is treated as authentic personhood, affirmation is treated as care, non-affirmation is treated as presumptive harm, distress is treated as evidence of abuse and clinical authority is treated as morally safer than family, church, conscience or tradition.

A better way: wisdom communities, not conversion policing

The deepest weakness of the draft Bill is not merely that it is vague, asymmetrical or chilling. It is that it proceeds from a shrunken account of human beings. It assumes that the self is most safely handled when insulated from disapproved forms of moral influence and placed under the supervision of approved institutional authority. That is not safeguarding in any rich sense. It is the bureaucratic management of identity – a product of the secular conceit that every facet of life may be reduced to the level of administrative technique.

The Christian tradition offers something better. It does not deny that people can be abused by families, churches, counsellors or communities. Scripture is far too honest about sin for that. Words can crush. Authority can be misused. The vulnerable can be manipulated. Bad religion – a topic that the Bible forensically dissects – can wound as well as heal. But the answer to bad influence is not the criminalisation of ordinary moral and spiritual influence. The answer is wise, truthful, accountable, patient care.

The Book of Proverbs assumes that human beings are formed in community. Parents teach, elders warn, friends sharpen one another, the simple are urged to gain prudence, the wise learn to receive reproof. The tongue can bring death or life. Counsel is to be weighed, not abolished. “In an abundance of counsellors there is safety.” (Proverbs 11:14). This is not a model of coercion. It is a model of a moral ecology in action, one based upon community and family.

Such wisdom is especially necessary where a person is distressed, confused, ashamed, tempted, alienated from their body, in conflict with their family or unsure how to understand their desires. The wise response is not to rush them onto an approved pathway, nor to crush them under denunciation. It is to listen carefully, speak truthfully, pray humbly, slow the process down, protect them from exploitation and refuse to reduce the whole person to a single identity-claim. However, the Book of Job adds an important warning. Job’s friends were present, but not wise. They sat with him in grief, but then forced his suffering into a simplistic explanatory scheme: there are parallels there with the motivations behind this Bill. Ideologues love to stuff individuals into their own reductionist templates, but that is precisely what vulnerable people do not need. They do not need either religious or therapeutic slogans. They need patient truthfulness before God.

An evangelical contribution to this debate should therefore be neither libertarian nor theocratic. It should not say, ‘Leave churches alone to do as they please.’ It should unequivocally support the punishment of coercion, humiliation, violence, sexual impropriety, fraud and exploitation wherever they occur – including, as Cass identified, within a clinical context. The protection of children and vulnerable adults from real abuse should be sacrosanct. But we should not confuse abuse with love, dissent with harm, correction with hatred, or distress with injury.

A good law would protect the vulnerable without turning families, churches and communities into suspects. It would recognise that conscience is not pathology, repentance is not abuse, and pastoral care is not a criminal risk merely because it refuses to baptise every self-description as truth. In the Wilberforce/Clapham Sect tradition, Christians should oppose cruelty wherever it is found. But they should also oppose laws which abolish the moral space in which truthful love can be spoken. A humane society does not protect the vulnerable by cutting them off from parents, pastors, friends, conscience and community. It protects them by insisting that all such relationships be governed by patience, humility, truth, mercy and justice.

The state can punish abuse, but it cannot manufacture wisdom. And when it tries to replace wisdom with suspicion, it does not protect community; it hollows it out.

Kevin Moss is a retired financial planner with a PhD in Enlightenment history from Aberystwyth University. You can find his blog, where this article first appeared, here.